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Why We Came to the City Quotes
Why We Came to the City
by
Kristopher Jansma2,470 ratings, 3.53 average rating, 324 reviews
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Why We Came to the City Quotes
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“Because no one was special, and no one was immune to tragedy.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, hope, dream: to be— to be, And oh! to lose. A thing for fools, this, and a holy thing, a holy thing to love.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“We began to build our castles in the air, hoping sooner or later they’d carry us off. New days came like clockwork without becoming tomorrows. We slept less and less, dipped in darkness through the daytime and heated by burning light in the endless evening. And only when we finally got up, threw on our clothes and walked away, did we realize that we had all been gone for years already.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“If the gods actually know our fates and still try to meddle and wage their wars in us, then there must be some purpose in our choosing one of the many paths to that end. Man must have free will, or else why would the gods themselves bother?”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“We came to the city because we wished to live haphazardly, to reach for only the least realistic of our desires, and to see if we could not learn what our failures had to teach, and not, when we came to live, discover that we had never died. We wanted to dig deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to be overworked and reduced to our last wit. And if our bosses proved mean, why then we’d evoke their whole and genuine meanness afterward over vodka cranberries and small batch bourbons. And if our drinking companions proved to be sublime then we would stagger home at dawn over the Old City cobblestones, into hot showers and clean shirts, and press onward until dusk fell again. For the rest of the world, it seemed to us, had somewhat hastily concluded that it was the chief end of man to thank God it was Friday and pray that Netflix would never forsake them.
Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.
Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity.
In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them.
Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.”
― Why We Came to the City
Still we lived frantically, like hummingbirds; though our HR departments told us that our commitments were valuable and our feedback was appreciated, our raises would be held back another year. Like gnats we pestered Management— who didn’t know how to use the Internet, whose only use for us was to set up Facebook accounts so they could spy on their children, or to sync their iPhones to their Outlooks, or to explain what tweets were and more importantly, why— which even we didn’t know. Retire! we wanted to shout. We ha Get out of the way with your big thumbs and your senior moments and your nostalgia for 1976! We hated them; we wanted them to love us. We wanted to be them; we wanted to never, ever become them.
Complexity, complexity, complexity! We said let our affairs be endless and convoluted; let our bank accounts be overdrawn and our benefits be reduced. Take our Social Security contributions and let it go bankrupt. We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home: we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday. Instead of three meals a day, we’d drink coffee for breakfast and scavenge from empty conference rooms for lunch. We had plans for dinner. We’d go out and buy gummy pad thai and throat-scorching chicken vindaloo and bento boxes in chintzy, dark restaurants that were always about to go out of business. Those who were a little flush would cover those who were a little short, and we would promise them coffees in repayment. We still owed someone for a movie ticket last summer; they hadn’t forgotten. Complexity, complexity.
In holiday seasons we gave each other spider plants in badly decoupaged pots and scarves we’d just learned how to knit and cuff links purchased with employee discounts. We followed the instructions on food and wine Web sites, but our soufflés sank and our baked bries burned and our basil ice creams froze solid. We called our mothers to get recipes for old favorites, but they never came out the same. We missed our families; we were sad to be rid of them.
Why shouldn’t we live with such hurry and waste of life? We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to be starved before we were hungry. We were determined to decrypt our neighbors’ Wi-Fi passwords and to never turn on the air-conditioning. We vowed to fall in love: headboard-clutching, desperate-texting, hearts-in-esophagi love. On the subways and at the park and on our fire escapes and in the break rooms, we turned pages, resolved to get to the ends of whatever we were reading. A couple of minutes were the day’s most valuable commodity. If only we could make more time, more money, more patience; have better sex, better coffee, boots that didn’t leak, umbrellas that didn’t involute at the slightest gust of wind. We were determined to make stupid bets. We were determined to be promoted or else to set the building on fire on our way out. We were determined to be out of our minds.”
― Why We Came to the City
“It's all about realizing what you're doing to hold yourself back, like through hatred or fear or nihilism or eating gluten. You identify the things you want, and you finally allow yourself to take them-'
William lost the end of her diatribe as a garbage truck rolled by outside”
― Why We Came to the City
William lost the end of her diatribe as a garbage truck rolled by outside”
― Why We Came to the City
“Everybody's just got their nose in their own soup. They say they care, but they don't put poems in books for me to read ... They talk to me about 'adjusting my expectations for the world.' And how I need to be realistic and just accept that this is how things work and that life is unfair ... I know, I know, I know.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“Easy to remember, hard to think about.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“… not because she’d wasted herself on them but because he didn’t see how any of them could be more powerful than her simple being.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“There were parts of the city we hadn't seen in years. They reminded us of people who had left us, and we excised them from our maps before they could spread. It's not the same, we said, it's just not the same. It's not like it was, before. We never said before what, but it was understood.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“and she told me self-portraits aren't really about faces but what's going on behind the faces.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“We were afraid to go on vacation because we didn't know if we could take coming back.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“Doctors prescribed things to help us sleep, smile, function.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“Hadn't we been told that now we'd made it here, we could make it anywhere? Only none of us could say, exactly, what it was we'd made.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“We asked no one in particular what the value of our time was. Anywhere else, it seemed, it would be more.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“We lay up at night, wondering, What sorts of people would we be if we were no longer nervous and frayed?”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“Because no one was immune to tragedy.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“Because you are a participant in a prosperous free economy, in which the work your parents do is valued at a certain amount by the invisible hand of the market, and soon you will rake your place in this grand system yourself, and through savings, investments, and avoiding the temptations of credit, you too will deserve privileges and comforts that others do not.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“These things went right to his head, it was true, but so what?”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“Man must have free will, William had written, or else why would the gods themselves bother?”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“It's no big deal," he said. "It's not like I have to be drunk all the time. It just makes me happier when I'm already happy, you know?”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“And still it felt like they were losing this fight”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“Time would tell, as sure as it would pass. It could not be March forever.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“The wind was telling the fish that hope is the last thing to die.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“We couldn’t stop following the news. Every ten seconds we refreshed our browsers and gawked at the headlines. Dully we read blogs of friends of friends of friends who had started an organic farm out on the Wichita River. They were out there pickling and canning and brewing things in the goodness of nature. And soon we’d worry it was time for us to leave the city and go. Go! To Uruguay or Morocco or Connecticut? To the Plains or the Mountains or the Bay? But we’d bide our time and after some months or years, our farmer friends would give up the farm and begin studying for the LSATs. We felt lousy about this, and wonderful.
We missed getting mail. We wondered why we even kept those tiny keys on our crowded rings. Sometimes we would send ourselves things from the office. Sometimes we would handwrite long letters to old loved ones and not send them. We never knew their new address. We never knew anyone’s address, just their cross streets and what their doors looked like. Which button to buzz, and if the buzzers even worked. How many flights to climb, and which way to turn off the stairs. Sometimes we missed those who hadn’t come to the city with us— or those who had gone to other, different cities. Sometimes we journeyed to see them, and sometimes they ventured to see us. Those were the best of times, for we were all at home and not at once. Those were the worst of times, for we inevitably longed to all move here or there, yet no one ever came— somehow everyone only left. Soon we were practically all alone.
Soon we began to hate the forever cramping of our lives. Sleeping on top of strangers and sipping coffee with people we knew we knew but couldn’t remember where from. Living out of boxes we had no space to unpack. Soon we named the pigeons roosting in our windowsills; we worried they looked mangier than the week before. We heard bellowing in the apartments below us and bedsprings creaking in the ones above. Everywhere we saw people with dogs and wodnered how they managed it. Did they work form home?Did they not work? Had they gone to the right schools? Did they have connections? We had no connections. Our parents were our guarantors in name only; they called us from their jobs in distant, colorless, suburban office parks and told us we could come home anytime, and this terrified us always.
But then came those nights, creeping up on us while we worked busily in dark offices, like submariners lost at sea, sailing through the dark stratosphere in our cement towers. We’d call each other to report: a good thing happened, a compliment had been paid, a favor had been appreciated, an inch of ground had been gained. We wouldn’t trade those nights for anything or anywhere. Those nights, we remembered why we came to the city. Because if we were really living, then we wanted to hear the cracking in our throats and feel the trembling in our extremities. And if our apartments were coffins and our desks headstones and our dreams infections— if we were all slowly dying — then at least we were going about that great and terrible business together.”
― Why We Came to the City
We missed getting mail. We wondered why we even kept those tiny keys on our crowded rings. Sometimes we would send ourselves things from the office. Sometimes we would handwrite long letters to old loved ones and not send them. We never knew their new address. We never knew anyone’s address, just their cross streets and what their doors looked like. Which button to buzz, and if the buzzers even worked. How many flights to climb, and which way to turn off the stairs. Sometimes we missed those who hadn’t come to the city with us— or those who had gone to other, different cities. Sometimes we journeyed to see them, and sometimes they ventured to see us. Those were the best of times, for we were all at home and not at once. Those were the worst of times, for we inevitably longed to all move here or there, yet no one ever came— somehow everyone only left. Soon we were practically all alone.
Soon we began to hate the forever cramping of our lives. Sleeping on top of strangers and sipping coffee with people we knew we knew but couldn’t remember where from. Living out of boxes we had no space to unpack. Soon we named the pigeons roosting in our windowsills; we worried they looked mangier than the week before. We heard bellowing in the apartments below us and bedsprings creaking in the ones above. Everywhere we saw people with dogs and wodnered how they managed it. Did they work form home?Did they not work? Had they gone to the right schools? Did they have connections? We had no connections. Our parents were our guarantors in name only; they called us from their jobs in distant, colorless, suburban office parks and told us we could come home anytime, and this terrified us always.
But then came those nights, creeping up on us while we worked busily in dark offices, like submariners lost at sea, sailing through the dark stratosphere in our cement towers. We’d call each other to report: a good thing happened, a compliment had been paid, a favor had been appreciated, an inch of ground had been gained. We wouldn’t trade those nights for anything or anywhere. Those nights, we remembered why we came to the city. Because if we were really living, then we wanted to hear the cracking in our throats and feel the trembling in our extremities. And if our apartments were coffins and our desks headstones and our dreams infections— if we were all slowly dying — then at least we were going about that great and terrible business together.”
― Why We Came to the City
“Grace, Irene had always believed, was a double-edged blade to be kept laced at her hip at all times. To appear unperturbed by all that was perturbing you eased both your own mind and the minds of those around you.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
“We’d been bankrupt since we’d left home; we’d secure our own society. Retirement was an afterlife we didn’t believe in and that we expected yesterday.”
― Why We Came to the City
― Why We Came to the City
